Double Cheese with Fear

Fear sells better than sex. But who’s buying?

The mothers of this country who are wrestling with threats!

Oh, my! What threats? If you thought it’s just Osama, you’re tak-ing big chances, because more danger is just outside your door, ring-ing the bell.

It’s the pizza delivery guy. Aren’t you afraid yet? Did you know that25% of pizza delivery drivers have been in jail within four months ofstarting the job bringing you your pie? From Sing-Sing to yourdoorstep! One in four!

38 Armed Madhouse

4Much of the information in “Double Cheese with Fear” was included in a late edition ofThe Best Democracy Money Can Buy. If you’ve read “Fear for Sale” in that book, you canskip a couple pages to “Marines in a Tube.”

Who said so? Derek Smith said so. He said (I can’t make this up):

What pizza do you like? At what price? Are you willing totake the risk associated with dealing with a company thatdoesn’t screen their drivers?

Who is this guy? Derek Smith is the founder of a company calledChoicePoint, prime contractor for the Department of Homeland Se-curity. He’s the man standing between your family and Al-Qaeda’smushroom-and-pepperoni sleeper cells. You should know somethingabout this Smith, because he knows an awful lot about you.4

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Last time I checked, Smith and ChoicePoint had piled up over 16billion files on every living and dying U.S. citizen, and they’ve put itup for sale, bit by bit. The company pulled in over a billion dollars inrevenues in 2005, only eleven years after Smith founded it.

ChoicePoint, the largest personal profile database company inAmerica, is the leader in the Fear Industry. The problem for CEOSmith and the firm he founded in 1994 is that, at first, the publicwasn’t buying . . . until September 11, 2001, when ChoicePoint’s newbusiness plan fell from the sky.

“The War on Terror hasn’t been decided yet, but a few winners areemerging,” wrote Forbes a few months after the attack. “High up onthe list of businesses that will benefit . . . ChoicePoint, Inc.”

They didn’t have to wait. ChoicePoint’s Bode Technologies divisionpicked up a $12 million contract to identify by DNA testing pieces ofcorpses found in the Staten Island garbage dump holding the TwinTowers.

Al-Qaeda’s attack set up an explosion of demand for Smith’s topproduct. His top product is you. Your Prozac prescription, Satan’schurch donations, Victoria’s Secret bill payments, driver’s license,voting record, you name it. And George Bush is buying. ChoicePointis operating a private FBI or, more accurately, a private KGB, becausethey keep files on you that the law doesn’t allow the FBI to hold.

The law in question is the U.S. Constitution, which says the gov-ernment can’t spy on you unless you’re suspected of a crime—butChoicePoint can, and that’s where the game begins. Under the USAPATRIOT act, Congress has outsourced the snooping. The Act allowsthe Feds to ask ChoicePoint for data the government itself cannotlegally obtain. The spooks at the new Total Information Office (now“Terrorism” Information Office since Congress changed the name andremoved the logo, the All-Seeing Eyeball—no kidding) couldn’t wait.In one classified document that came our way, a Total Info honcho ex-horted agencies to come up with “far-out, funky” uses of the Choice-Point info they aren’t supposed to have. Groovy, man.

And what does the family Bush do with ChoicePoint’s funky

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information? In Florida, it was ChoicePoint’s DBT unit that came upwith the list of 94,000 “felons” to purge from Florida voter rolls be-fore the 2000 election. At least 91,000 were innocent legal voters,but the vast majority of these were guilty of nothing more than beingBlack, Democrats or both. (See Chapter 4.)

And now, ChoicePoint wants your blood. Why? Because “Choice-Point Cares.” That’s the name of its program to reunite those kiddies onmilk cartons with their loved ones. And they’ll need your DNA to do it.

That’s the point of the ghost stories of pizza men coming to snatchyour milk-carton baby, to convince “the mothers of this country fac-ing threats” to raise no objections to the data goldminers digging intoyour bank accounts, medical records and bloodstream. And now,with Osama out there, Americans can’t wait to rush into the protec-tive arms of our computerized Big Brother.

But come on, if ChoicePoint gets the bad guys for us, who cares?However, ChoicePoint, unlike the Canadian Mounties, is not likely toget their man. The Illinois State Police, for example, tested Choice-Point’s DNA-matching evidence used in more than a thousand rapecases. The police scientists say ChoicePoint got it wrong 25% of thetime. In some cases, it appears, ChoicePoint produced test “results”on evidence that didn’t exist.

As you see, ChoicePoint cares, but ChoicePoint also lies. In Novem-ber 2000, when our Observer-BBC Television team discovered the falsetagging of Black voters in Florida, I expected their PR men to give methe usual song and dance to slither out of the tough questions. ButChoicePoint’s spokesmen simply made it up, telling me they’d checkedthe names against Social Security numbers. I got the scrub sheets, andthey hadn’t checked in 95% of cases. They did, however, list eachvoter’s race.

The company flat-out denied to one reporter that they give DNA tothe feds, but when one of my investigators called, posing as a studentinterested in a career in “data management,” the firm boasted it is thebiggest supplier of DNA information to the FBI. “And that scares thehell out of me,” said a ChoicePoint executive (who has since bailed out

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of the company) on condition of anonymity. ChoicePoint says it onlykeeps DNA records on bad guys. However, said the insider, “Derek saidhis hope [is] to build a database of DNA samples from every person inthe United States . . . linked to all the other information held by CP,”from medical records to voting records.

So what? Because, the executive told me, they get it wrong. Waywrong, says the World Privacy Forum’s Pam Dixon, who sampledChoicePoint’s credit-reporting wares and found 90% of the recordscontained errors. At least they’ve improved from Florida days.

Bad information spread about you can ruin you. But so can goodinformation in the wrong hands. In 2005, ChoicePoint mistakenlysold 145,000 credit card records to a band of identity thieves. That lit-tle slip earned them, in 2006, a $15 million fine from the FederalTrade Commission, the highest in FTC history.

Your data wasn’t protected, but the company’s inside track is wellbullet-proofed. Its retainers include Vin Weber, former congressmanand a cofounder of Project for a New American Century (PNAC) withRichard Armitage, who served on the board of ChoicePoint’s Floridaunit. (Armitage, after the vote-purging work was done, was appointeda Deputy Secretary of State.) The remainder of the ChoicePoint Boardof Directors looks like a Bush fundraising gala, including Home De-pot founder Bernie Marcus and his partner Ken Langone, Treasurer ofRudy Giuliani’s aborted Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton.

Billionaire Langone is perfect for ChoicePoint, a man who knowshow to make good use of data: He was charged with insider trading bythe Securities Exchange Commission in 2004. Admittedly, the chief ofthe New York Stock Exchange, Richard Grasso, likened the accusa-tions against Langone of a massive fraud to “a traffic ticket.” The stockmarket regulator Grasso might have been a wee bit influenced by Lan-gone’s secretly approving Grasso’s taking more than $100 million inextra pay from the Exchange. Apparently, the Attorney General ofNew York thought so and, in a civil complaint, has charged Grasso andLangone with conspiracy, charges both are fighting. But let’s not singleout one Board member. ChoicePoint CEO Smith is, in 2006, himself

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42 Armed Madhouse

Freedom of Information?

Why does ChoicePoint get a no-bid contract from the Bush Adminis-tration? Here’s the answer we received in response to a “Freedom ofInformation” request. At least they’ve crossed out the “secret” stamp.(Source: EPIC)

under investigation for insider trading. Smith failed to notify victimsof the credit card number theft until after he had unloaded some of hisown ChoicePoint stock. The Securities and Exchange Commissionraised some questions about the suspiciously brilliant timing of Smith’ssales. The company has said the sales were entirely proper.

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But I digress. Or maybe not. Because it’s all about the exchange ofinformation—who knows what and who knows whom. Every warneeds intelligence. It’s not the War on Terror these guys are fighting, it’sthe Class War. Information is a weapon and our betters are armingthemselves. The Bush Administration has reversed the flow common todemocracy: Instead of information about the government going to WeThe People, it is now information about We The People going to gov-ernment, or better, contractors beholden to board directors, not voters.

This Class Info-War is global. And ChoicePoint is on the frontlines. Working with an extraordinary group of disaffected intelligenceexperts from the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washing-ton, we got our hands on a copy of a $67 million agreement betweenHomeland Security and ChoicePoint. The agreement was so confi-dential it was not even given a contract number. It was a no-bid deal,of course. But if it gets the Qaeda network, who’s going to moanabout a little secrecy.

But take a look at this document marked, on page 44, “FEDERALBUREAU OF INVESTIGATION—SECRET.” It is about the FBI’s con-tract with ChoicePoint to obtain government records on every citizenin half a dozen countries. The September 11 hijackers came fromSaudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates and Pakistan. But the FBI has, oddly,chosen Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Honduras and Venezuela. Is therean exploding enchilada conspiracy sneaking over the border? Or is itsomething else that put these nation’s citizenry on the terror watchlist? Notably, each nation had an anti-Bush president running for re-election or an anti-Bush candidate in the lead for the presidency.Hmm. When I was in Venezuela in 2004, I noted that Súmate, a groupseeking the recall of Bush’s bête noire, President Hugo Chávez, had ateach registration booth a laptop computer with the voter rolls. Theanti-Chávez group could challenge improper (i.e. pro-Chávez) vot-ers. Was this Florida-goes-Latin? No one could say where Súmategot the lists or if these were the ones lifted by ChoicePoint. We doknow that Súmate received cash payments from the Bush Adminis-tration.

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Hunting for Hijackers . . . in Venezuela?

Every September 11 hijacker came from the Arabian Peninsula orPakistan. Yet, from a source with a copy not blacked out, we learnedthe hunt was limited to Venezuela, Mexico and other Latin nations withpresidential elections favoring anti-Bush candidates.

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The interesting thing about ChoicePoint’s obtaining these citizenfiles from Venezuela, Mexico and Argentina is that according to pressreports and officials I spoke with, in those countries this is a crime.ChoicePoint blames any misconduct on its operatives. Nevertheless,Mexico contractors were busted; arrests were avoided in Argentinawhen ChoicePoint promised to erase its copies of the list. But whatabout Bush’s copy?

Creating a master file on you—from your DNA to your party regis-tration (what do you think new voter IDs are really about?)—makesus safer, right? As ChoicePoint CEO Smith tells us, the September 11hijackers checked in under their real names. Had his data system forthe new Transportation Safety Administration been in place on thatday, the bad guys, all on ChoicePoint lists, would have set off warningblinks when they checked in, like the alarm that nabbed Mrs. Zapol-sky’s baby. There is, however, a minor flaw in his system: Osama andfriends no longer book flights under their own names—even thoughthis has cost them thousands of frequent flier miles.

Marines in a Tube

We know the cure for The Fear is “less liberty, more weaponry.” Choice-Point will help dispose of our liberties cheap, but how can we defendourselves?

General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martinhave just what we need to stick in our nation’s holster: the Virginia-class submarine.

The Virginia-class U-boat was originally designed to hunt Sovietsubs. The problem with the 1996 design is that the Soviet Union wentout of business seven years earlier. Never mind. That didn’t stop ourtriumvirate of corporate warriors. They’ve redesigned the Virginia-class for the War on Terror.

Given that our enemies today are mostly guys carrying box cuttersand stuffing TNT in their shoes, I was curious as to how these sub-o-saurs would be helpful in post-cold-war theaters of battle. Our BBC

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